A former U.S. official says that NSA analysts believe that Edward Snowden may have copied "almost everything [the NSA] does," Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller of The Washington Post report.
As of last night it was reported that officials didn't know how much Snowden took from the NSA’s Hawaii facility where he worked as a Booz Allen contractor.
“They think he copied so much stuff — that almost everything that place does, he has,” one former government official, referring to the NSA, told The Post. “Everyone’s nervous about what the next thing will be, what will be exposed.”
Last week NSA Director Keith Alexander told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that Snowden fabricated digital keys that gave him access to areas way above his clearance as a low-level contractor and systems administrator.
Earlier this month, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald told The New York Times that Snowden gave him “thousands” of documents, “dozens” of which Greenwald says are newsworthy.
Snowden told the South China Morning Post that the he got a job at Booz Allen to get "access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked."
He added:
"If I have time to go through this information, I would like to make it available to journalists in each country to make their own assessment, independent of my bias, as to whether or not the knowledge of US network operations against their people should be published."
Greenwald recently told CNN he knows Snowden "has in his possession thousands of documents, which, if published, would impose crippling damage on the United States’ surveillance capabilities and systems around the world.”
The fear is that Chinese or Russian intelligence have gained access or will gain access to classified files Snowden may have in his possession.
It’s unclear whether officials in Hong Kong or in Russia, where Snowden fled over the weekend, obtained any of the classified material. A spokesman for the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, which has been assisting the former National Security Agency contractor, strenuously denied reports that foreign governments had made copies of the documents.
Snowden has provided documents detailing how NSA hackers systematically targeted computers and civilian targets in Hong Kong and mainland China over a four-year period.
Greenwald said he wouldn't have published that information.
“Whether I would have disclosed the specific IP addresses in China and Hong Kong the NSA is hacking, I don’t think I would have,” Greenwald told The Daily Beast. “What motivated that leak though was a need to ingratiate himself to the people of Hong Kong and China.”
Matthew Rojansky, the deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, told David M. Herszenhorn of The New York Times that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the post-Soviet successor of the K.G.B., would naturally want to talk to Snowden.
“The guy is supposedly carrying four laptops, plus a bunch of thumb drives, supposedly knows all sorts of other things,” he said. “You don’t pass up an opportunity like that. You don’t just let him pass through the business lounge, on the way to Cuba.”
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